With Alatri we end one main stage of our _iter_, that of the hill-cities. We shall henceforth pass by places which lie more in the world, some of them in the thick of modern communication. But if we had turned back at Alatri, we should have done a good stroke of work. A journey to the walls of the Hernicans is in every way pleasant and profitable. And in truth, even if we throw in the Old-Latins and the Volscians, it is not a journey of hardships. The little inns are very humble, very simple, but they may be fed in and slept in without anything very frightful to endure. It may perhaps be well to mention that the _Locanda d'Italia_, at Anagni, recommended in various guide-books, has ceased to exist for some years. Still a day and a night at Anagni are no hardship, and a guide may be found, shirtless and letterless, who knows what is really worth going to much better than many in England who boast at once more clothes and more learning. Indeed, the men of the walls seem altogether a kindly and well-disposed race. Some say that is because they are said to be reclaimed brigands, perhaps on the principle that a reformed rake used to be said to make the best husband. There are indeed more beggars among them than need be; but on this head a wise rule was laid down by a young Volscian, or he might be a Hernican--we cannot always be exact among these obsolete nationalities--"Give to the halt and the blind; but not to anybody else." IV. From Alatri to Capua. We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the special necessities of an _iter ad Brundisium_ carry us to quite other parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a chance likeness between the names--a name that ranges from the Euxine to the Hudson--without seeking in any sort to identify the Ἀλβανοί of Dionysios and the Ἀλβανοί of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious